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Sci-Fi

What if Energy was (Nearly) Free? 177

Posted by Cliff from the looking-forward-with-minimal-navel-gazing dept.
anvilmark asks: "Sci-Fi and sci-fi games often incorporate the romantic idea of 'free trader' ships with ports of call on a myriad planets across the galaxy. Recently I was toying with the physics of propelling such ships and their cargos out of a gravity well and realized the astronomical amounts of power it would take to do it (not to mention interstellar travel). This led naturally to contemplating how cheap energy would have to be in order to make this activity profitable. To make a long story short (too late!), I began wondering what would happen if the introduction of fusion power takes energy costs from pennies per kilowatt hour to pennies per megawatt hour (or GWH)? How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?"
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What if Energy was (Nearly) Free? More

What if Energy was (Nearly) Free?

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  • One less thing... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JasonMaggini ( 190142 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:10PM (#6396630)
    ..for dads everywhere to yell about.

    "Electricity's expensive! Ya trying to cool off the whole neighborhood? Close the #@%$ door!"

  • change change change (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:11PM (#6396633) Homepage
    How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?

    Somebody will undoubtedly declare war on somebody else. ;)

    Go read Diamond Age [cyberpunk.ru] by Neal Stephenson

  • Free Energy = (Score:3, Funny)

    by $exyNerdie ( 683214 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:11PM (#6396635) Homepage Journal

    Free Energy = Laser wars

    A New Laser For War And Peace [space.com]

  • Thump thump thump (Score:3, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:12PM (#6396639) Homepage Journal
    "How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?"

    Hmmmm... I wonder if anybody'd notice the extinction of the Energizer Bunny.

  • Actually... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Drakin ( 415182 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:18PM (#6396675)
    I've got no clue what point that it'd become viable.

    However, there's one item of trade that's better suited for such a system.

    Information.

    There's actually been some novels about it, where the traders don't trade for goods, but for information, new concepts, inventions and the like. Information for information (and supplies as nessisary, but that's less often). It takes up less space, and you don't need to rendevous to preform the trade.

  • Global warming (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PeteyG ( 203921 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:19PM (#6396681) Homepage Journal
    Let's be reasonable. If we're going to have massive amounts of inexpensive energy available, then it's going to get used in large amounts. And unless this energy is coming straight out of the Earth's biosphere's ambient energy, we would be dumping massive amounts of extra heat into our ecosystem.

    If we're not careful, we could wind up generating enough heat to change the weather and alter the Earth's rate of temperature change.
    • But if energy was cheap enough, I'm sure we could come up with a way to increase the rate at which heat is radiated back into space, and/or decrease the rate at which heat is absorbed from the sun. :P

      =Smidge=

      • Re:Global warming (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AndyDeck ( 29830 ) *
        > But if energy was cheap enough, I'm sure we could come up with a way to increase the rate at which heat is radiated back into space, and/or decrease the rate at which heat is absorbed from the sun. :P
        >=Smidge=

        I've actually thought about this - and I believe that the answer lies in a discovery that was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics [nobel.se] - Laser Cooling. Now the technique as described is for cooling atoms to near-absolute zero so as to be able to observe them better, but with Unlimited Free Ene

        • Re:Global warming (Score:3, Interesting)

          by maxume ( 22995 )
          What about the kinetic energy of the object that you hurled into the earth? I guess the easiest way to deal with the KE would be to pretend that it was dissapated purely by heating your mass(and thus not the atmosphere), and as such, the only cooling effect your mass would affect is that from whatever amount of mass stopped moving. I don't feel like figuring it out more than that, but I don't think you would come out all that far ahead on the whole cooling thing, especially when you consider the rather imme
        • IIRC most (if not all) laser cooling is done on alkali metal atoms. Dropping a cold lump of any alkali metal into the ocean may not have the cooling effect you would hope for.
      • You build a big reflector that sits between the sun and the Earth. You did say that energy was free didn't you?
    • This has been discussed in sci-fi. It could in fact cause warming of the eco system if energy were free and used on a massive scale. There would be ways of dealing with it -- reduce the Earth's albedo and therefore it's natural heat absorbtion. Add reflectors in orbit that block sunlight. Beam energy away from Earth (pulling heat out of the eco-system). Move the Earth further from the Sun (which may need to be done anyway). Build a shell around the Earth (a la Ring World). and so on.
  • the guy that owned (Nearly) would be totally set...

  • Heavy Water Depletion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:25PM (#6396724) Homepage
    I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium. It might take a while, but the oil fields of Texas were once thought to be an endless resource. Maybe before that happens we can build a Dyson Sphere [nada.kth.se] and blend in with the rest of the universe's dark matter.
    • I once read a statistic (sorry no source) that we could use energy at the current growth rate for 10,000 years and only use up one centimeter off the top of the worlds oceans. Incidentally, the increase in ambient heat might just melt the polar caps enough to offset the lowering.

      At least in 10,000 years we will be able to play DukeNukem Forever and ... ;-)
      • Ok I have a question for you though. How many centimeters of seawater must be processed to remove that 1 cm of heavy water? I would think a decent ball park figure might be based on how many parts per million there are of deuterium to normal seawater. Also, energy would not get used or grow at current rates. If energy is 1000x cheaper it will soon be used at 1000x the rate.
        • A little browsing and...
          according to this site, there is
          an area of about 361 million sq km [bartleby.com] for the worlds oceans. According to this source, deuterium is one part in ten thousand of the hydrogen in water [ucla.edu].

          Now a little math... 361,000,000,000m^2*0.01m = 3.61 billion cu meters used in 10,000 years. total volume of the worlds ocean ( again from the first site ) is 1,347,000,000 cu km or 1.347x10^18 cu meters. So the first divided by the second gives percent of the ocean used, about 2.7x10^-9 ( avery small fra
        • Ok, just for the sake of argument, assume you never have to pay an electricity bill again. How would your life differ?

          Sure, you might turn the AC down a couple more degrees, replace low wattage bulbs with higher wattage bulbs, never turn your car off, etc., but can you realistically increase your current energy consumption by any more than 5x? 10x? Even 20x?

          I seriously doubt that you could increase your energy utilization by 100x (let alone the 1000x you propose) without doing some seriously stupid stuff

    • I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium

      You assume that fusion is the only way. Personally, I see the world moving beyond fusion power fairly quickly. By far the best source of energy for our needs is the sun. Now I'm not talking about everyone having a solar panel on their roof, I'm talking massive scale harvesting of all the energy that usually is "wasted" going off to light nowhere. Say you harvest 500 square kilometers of sun that usually would

    • Even if this were true, you're forgetting two things: first, you can fuse atoms other than tritium and deuterium (albeit they're among the easiest). Second, if energy is essentially free, then we can mine the vast stores of material available from other sources like, the sun, Jupiter, Saturn, asteroids, and so on.

      If we run out with that kind of reserve resource available, we deserve to have fire taken away!

  • I am not sure about many other Universities around the country... but electricity for some universities is purchased in blocks. Basically this means that it costs just about as much to turn all the lights off in labor as the added cost of just leaving them on all the time. I wonder if energy costs for the average consumer decrease then might we see more of this type of thing in the American household. Longer lasting lights would also add to this happening.
    • Virginia Tech generates it's own electricity using a university owned power plant with a system of boiler, which by design, can run on whatever is the cheapest fuel available at the time (coal, oil, gas, biomass, etc) They also use the steam from these boilers to heat the campus. I'm sure they're concerned about energy usage since they see a direct effect on their fuel bills...

  • Look to Las Vegas for an answer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by martinde ( 137088 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:27PM (#6396733) Homepage
    I think Everytown, USA, would be filled with gawdy advertising of various forms.

    Hopefully there would be some useful innovations, too, but most likely it would promote insane inefficiency. (Think Ford Expedition*10...)
  • So we get free free energy. What do we do first? We refridgerate every building on the planet. That would raise the outdoor temperature significantly over a few years.

    On the bright side, it will be possible to microwave the entire planet and get rid of RFID tags.

    If such energy became available, it wouldn't likely be available to the every planet-bound citizen. More likely, it would be like nuclear power in that it would be very highly regulated and unavailable directly to individuals. They could get the benifits of it, but only in moderation at an extremely high markup.
    • "That would raise the outdoor temperature significantly over a few years."

      Don't worry, we will then just refridgerate the whole outdoor too, and send the heat to outer space.

    • So what stops someone else from undercutting the markup and starting a race for the bottom? Nothing, in fact stops it and the energy business turns into a very low margin utility. If energy is free or almost free then transportation costs are likely to be minimal. You can't buy *every* jurisdiction to politically keep out new market entrants and there can't be high costs to entry otherwise the energy would not be free, it would cost the generation cost plus the amortization of the significant entry costs in

      • So what stops someone else from undercutting the markup and starting a race for the bottom?

        Taxation.

        • So you're shifting the scenario from a private greed conspiracy to a government one to slow/stop the massive dislocation that a radical reduction in energy prices would produce? Well, where's the money going to go? Governments that tend to rely heavily on energy (nowadays oil) revenues for their budgets are very badly affected by the corruption bug. A lot of countries wouldn't go along with that, especially if they can gain an economic advantage through lower taxation.

          • So you're shifting the scenario from a private greed conspiracy to a government one to slow/stop the massive dislocation that a radical reduction in energy prices would produce?

            No. I'm taxing pollution to simplify the job for the judges so they don't have to handle millions of class-action lawsuits.

            Well, where's the money going to go?

            We could reduce income taxes.

            Governments that tend to rely heavily on energy (nowadays oil) revenues for their budgets are very badly affected by the corruption bug.

            • You've made an unwarranted assumption that the new free energy is not also clean. Fusion is clean, beamed solar energy is clean, and pure hydrogen fuel cells are clean so why is this unidentified, energium X source automatically dirty?

              You're not only a wacko environmentalist too quick with the regulation, tax, and protest but you're also a militarist, imperialist who can't tolerate different approaches and will roll over any resistence.

              • You've made an unwarranted assumption that the new free energy is not also clean.

                No I didn't. I made a warranted assumption (based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics) that using that energy is not clean.

                You're not only a wacko environmentalist too quick with the regulation, tax, and protest but you're also a militarist, imperialist who can't tolerate different approaches and will roll over any resistence.

                Nuh uh. :)

                • So increased entropy = dirty in your book. Well, by that standard we might as well ignore pollution because we'll never be rid of it unless we all drop dead and it'll still exist, we just won't be around to care anymore.

                  So, do you belong to the Volunteer Human Extinction Movement?

                  • So increased entropy = dirty in your book. Well, by that standard we might as well ignore pollution because we'll never be rid of it unless we all drop dead and it'll still exist, we just won't be around to care anymore.

                    By any standard we'll never be rid of pollution. The whole point of pollution is it's only a problem in large quantities. That's why most forms of pollution aren't criminal, they're merely taxed so as to discourage, not to elminate.

    • There is nothing to prevent you, as an individual, from owning your own nuclear power plant. Of course, the cost of implementing such a thing, and proving it meets all the safety requirements, and providing the necessary documentation to the NRC and DOE, and following up with regular inspections, not to mention the cost of the fuel, might prove prohibitive to an individual.

      Having said that, I'm not critical of the regulations because they're there for a reason! It's not like owning a car; the results f

  • Hosting Charges (Score:3, Interesting)

    by simsj ( 570482 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:28PM (#6396741)
    I suspect that this would drop my hosting chages. About 5 years ago, I was charged mostly for bandwidth and RUs. Now they don't care so much about how large it is as how much juice it uses.

  • Free Energy -- too cheap to meter! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crmartin ( 98227 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:41PM (#6396806)
    I've done a lot of thinking about this myself, and it turns out to have some interesting implications.

    First, it turns out that the cost of electric at the wall-socket is not dominated by the cost of production, but by the cost of the power grid. If the power were completely free, cost/kW-h at the home would only go down by about 50 percent.

    On the other hand, cost of electricity does dominate the cost to make aluminum, steel, and many chemicals: profits would immediately go up, and costs would quickly drop precipitously for everything from cars to Tylenol.

    Free electric power wouldn't in itself make space travel cheaper, but if you have cheap fusion you can either make fusion rockets, or extend VASIMR. If you can get thrust high and exhaust velocity very high -- say tens to hundreds of km/sec -- then you can quickly start doing things like going to the Moon with constant acceleration. In other words, a trip from Earth to Moon could be quicker than a trip from New York to Boston today.

    Waste disposal would change radically -- give me enough power and I'll just do mass spectroscopy on a plasma made from the wastes. Call it 'mass mass spectroscopy' -- out the end comes pure (isotopically pure, if you care to do it) oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and so on. This will be very handy for Lunar exploration, as it makes possible the easy separation of 3He from 4He; 3He makes for good fusion fuel, and 4He ("depleted helium"?) makes for cheap reaction mass or lots of other things. On the other hand, it makes uranium enrichment much easier as well -- throw in yellowcake, and out the other end comes O2 235U and 238U.

    If lunar 3He production is economic, so is production of hydrogen (either from fossil water or as a byproduct of 3He production) as well as oxygen, nitrogen, argon, potassium, thorium, and so on. (See KREEP.) Add O2, N2, and lights to a lunar lava tube, and you've got living space and farms -- with cheap power.
    • First, it turns out that the cost of electric at the wall-socket is not dominated by the cost of production, but by the cost of the power grid. If the power were completely free, cost/kW-h at the home would only go down by about 50 percent.

      Sounds about right - figures I've seen state that generation, transmission and distribution costs are about 40/20/40. BTW, although I am not a power engineer, I did several power systems courses at the Big U.

      Hydro power, wind power and some solar power have essential

  • It couldn't happen (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tickticker ( 549972 )
    The actual production costs may go down, but they are probably way less than 50% of total costs.

    There is the infrastucture costs, salaries, maintenance, delivery systems (poles, wire, labor), and whatever else goes into producing the fusion reaction.

  • some of the effects (Score:5, Interesting)

    by evilWurst ( 96042 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:45PM (#6396833) Journal
    Some of the obvious effects of near-free power:

    1) we'll use a lot more power, simply because we can. In some ways this will reduce combustion - electric heat in the winter, electric vehicles (at the very least, electric for short range vehicles and gas for long range). Appliances will have more features and draw more power both while active and while idle.

    2) Appliances will be less efficient. This also means they will generate more heat. Everyone will have air conditioning, though, because it'll be cheap to run. The extra waste heat will be enough, especially in southern cities in summer, to increase the local temperature (more so than now).

    3) new energy-hungry applications will arise that aren't developed now because of the power requirements. Non-portable computers will tend towards beowulf clusters because it'll be cheaper to buy N chips than single superchips.

    4) the power grid must be expanded to carry the increase volume of power. Depending on the fusion technology's specifics, this will either mean lots of small fusion plants, or large fusion plants and a lot more power lines. Power lines my be overhead, or buried. Expect lots more research on cheaper, warmer-operating superconductors. Expect the results to end up used in everything else, especially electronics.

    5) Less international conflict based on water supply - because desalination plants will be much cheaper to operate.

    6) Changes in travel, especially sea travel. You can't build a ship the size of an aircraft carrier right now without being a major world power, because of the expertise needed and fuel needed. Fusion may allow this, though. This will certainly make long range shipping cheaper. It would eventually effect people as well - many would choose a cheap two-day sea trip to cross the sea over an expensive and crowded plane flight, especially if it was a vacation trip on a budget and the scenery was good. (business-class travellers would likely still fly).

    I'm sure there are more, that's just the ones that jumped out at me after a few moments.
  • No concept of investment whatsoever.

    Silly. Trying to get free energy... What maroons!

    I'd send a few probes at every 10 degrees away from Earth and have them drop various hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon trapping thingies every so often. Heck while the probes are travelling they should collect the building blocks for building the trapping thingies, deposit the stuff, then use some to get a nice boost to the next drop point.

    By the time the probe reaches its end, the next generation on earth would have the reso

  • Waste Heat (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SN74S181 ( 581549 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:46PM (#6396838)
    It's really a simple answer:

    The first reckless party held by a bunch of teenagers would result in the evaporation of the oceans.

    Let's face it, we live in a relatively closed system. An amount of energy comes into the biosphere that is relatively constant. The biosphere has evolved and developed dependent on that amount of energy being relatively constant.

    Any 'revolution' in energy that means we have infinite amounts of it will mean the waste heat from all the new consuption will reck havoc on everything.
    • Peter Hamilton's Nightsdawn trilogy actually had something like this happen on Earth; waste heat from centuries of increasing energy use pushed the climate into one that's practically unlivable. The people of Earth live in huge reinforced domes while "Armada" storms tear into everything.

      Anyone care to take a guess at how much heat we would need to pump out in order to significantly impact global temperatures directly?
      • Anyone care to take a guess at how much heat we would need to pump out in order to significantly impact global temperatures directly?

        If everyone on the planet converted from fossil fuel to wind powered electricity in 30 years, it would take another 300 years to undo the excess heat trapped in the troposphere over the past 300 years [bovik.org]

    • Deep-sixing the world's old cities and buildings (crowded at every coastline) might actually be pretty cool in the long run, a totally 'fresh start' for humanity requiring new architecture and transport designs.

      Also, the excess heat would allow for enhanced agriculture in the temperate and arctic zones (where most of the stuff I actually care about exists). The tropics might be reduced to deserts, but they will anyway after a few decades.

      On the other hand, with 'infinite' energy it would become economica
    • I read somewhere that if Manhattan Island had to dissipate all the energy it uses by radiation, i.e. if cooling breezes didn't blow it away, the temperature of the island would rise to about two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

      Remember Barry Commoner's three laws? "Everything must go somewhere. Everything is connected to everything else. There is no such thing as a free lunch."

  • Subjucticate! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rritterson ( 588983 ) * on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:55PM (#6396885)
    Well, if energy was free, then it would still be free today, and I'd imagine that most of the aftereffects would have already occured.

    However, if energy were free (note use of subjuctive), which i think is what you meant, I take the cynical view that it would only destroy ourselves more quickly.

    For example, it's not that we can't get to Mars via rocket today, we simply can't get enough energy crammed into a feasible size. If it were cheaper nothing would change.

    At the same time, you are assuming that just because the mass/energy ratio of fusion is much higher, that makes it cheaper. This is not the case. In fact, coal is an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear power. Looking at current research into fusion technology, the extremely highpowered lasers and plasma contol technologies would be very expensive to build.
    • Your point being that if the extremely cheap energy were really expensive, it wouldn't be cheap after all?
    • However, if energy were free (note use of subjuctive)

      Rule #783 of the internet: If you're going to be pedantic and picky, you have to do it right.

      The word is "subjunctive," not "subjuctive." You spelled it incorrectly twice, so no claims based on the Typo Exemption will be entertained.

  • DeBeers (Score:5, Funny)

    by Col. Klink (retired) ( 11632 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @08:57PM (#6396900)
    If energy were plentiful and cheap, I think DeBeers would find a way to make people think it wasn't to keep the price artificially high.

    And, unless sand was the new source of energy, I wouldn't want to be a Saudi prince.

  • This is easy... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Asprin ( 545477 ) <gsarnold@yahoo.cMOSCOWom minus city> on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @09:11PM (#6396963) Homepage Journal

    This is easy - if energy were nearly free, the whole world would turn into Las Vegas. Seriously. Because of the Hoover Dam out there, a typical household can run everything including the air conditioner for, like, $15/month. It's sickening.

  • Be creative! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @09:20PM (#6397010) Journal
    It is often said that the effects of this kind of thing are overestimated in the short term, but underestimated in the long term.

    I won't directly speculate, but I'd point a few thing things out:

    One, almost axiomatic right now is that even if we colonize space, we could never afford to lift any significant fraction of humanity off the surface. Effectively infinite power makes this possible, and the social changes this would unleash, even before it happened, the effect on the public conciousness and unconciousness, are almost entirely unpredictable. Right now, without even thinking about it much, we live on Earth, and there is nothing else. We have no Frontier anymore. Having one again would change things in almost unimaginable ways.

    Two, it's the secondary effects you can't predict. Physicists might be able to build a bigger and better particle accelerator with more power, thanks to some previously prohibitively-energy-expensive alloy or something, and crack the secrets of the universe.

    Three, the final limits of computation as we know it are driven by power consumption. Consequences of that left to the imagination. (Quantum computing may provide a partial out, but then again, probably only partial if it's significant at all; There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.)

    • One, almost axiomatic right now is that even if we colonize space, we could never afford to lift any significant fraction of humanity off the surface

      With solar power (at the top), beanstalks, and clever scheduling policy (in a nutshell: young women get priority) we could get everybody off within a generation or two. With automated canister city factories & asteriods to play with we could even have a nice place to put them.

      The problem isn't energy. The problem is that you could never implement such

      • I meant socially... nobody believes it's possible.

        There are theoretical technologies that might allow it other then the mythical "free energy", but until they happen, nobody will believe it's possible. When they do the psychology of humanity will change radically.

        Even if, as you say, the adults will mostly be too pig-headed to leave, which I agree with, the children would go, and the parents would most likely encourage it if they believe they could live a better life out there then down here, which for mu

        • Even if, as you say, the adults will mostly be too pig-headed to leave, which I agree with, the children would go, and the parents would most likely encourage it if they believe they could live a better life out there then down here, which for much of the world is probably true.

          An interesting side-effect would be that the people who left, assuming equal opportunity for all, would overwhelmingly be from poor countries like India and Nigeria.

          The Earth would be left as an underpopulated white-bread count

          • An interesting side-effect would be that the people who left, assuming equal opportunity for all, would overwhelmingly be from poor countries like India and Nigeria.

            We've seen this happen before; the US was formed from the outcasts of Europe, and Australia from the actual criminals. With the resources of space, the impetus to stay alive prompting more and better tech, and the fact that being poor brings out good work habits rather more then being rich does on the average, I think the space society would o
  • After a couple of years or so, the lawyers would descend, empowered by this new, unlimited energy, and gum up the works in a storm of IP lawsuits.
    In the end, you would be paying slightly more to the same vendors you were buying your energy resources from before the discovery.

  • What would cheap energy change? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DuckDuckBOOM! ( 535473 ) * on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @09:55PM (#6397209)
    Everything.

    Heavily paraphrasing old memories of Pournelle's A Step Farther Out [amazon.com]: With sufficiently cheap energy, we can reduce toxic wastes to their component elements; turn the Sahara into farmland; give everyone on Earth at least the standard of living the US had in the 1950s; mine the asteroids; colonize our solar system and others; move industry into space and turn the Earth into a garden.

    And he's right. The cost of producing the vast majority of goods and services is heavily dependent on the cost of energy. Make that energy "too cheap to meter" (as was promised us when the first nuke plants were under construction - sigh -), and the cost of production - including raw materials - drops to essentially the cost of labor. And labor costs drop too: a well-fed, prosperous work force using exotic tools, e.g. diamond-tipped cutters or 8-way Xeon workstations, is much more productive than hungry, unhappy, poorly-equipped workers.

    That being said, if this scenario is taken to the extreme, the possibility of global warming from simple waste heat rears its ugly head. There are probably ways of dealing with that, but, given the number of times my power's gone out this week (lots of wicked weather), I'm not sure I'd trust the planet's viability to bleeding-edge tech. So it goes.

  • Cheap energy sounds great with great possibilities, and with some effort from the society might even be possible. Imagine electric cars more powerful than gas ones running off almost nothing.

    But things work much better with efficiency. If you eat only as much as you need to, you'd look great. People buy centrino and transmeta laptops because they run longer on the same battery than an Athlon Thunderbird. Making living quarters as small as possible and stacking them has made the manhattan possible and pushi

  • I would... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 ) <mdinsmore&gmail,com> on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @11:00PM (#6397530) Homepage Journal

    I would turn it up to 11!
  • Maybe... SUVs the size of tanks? Wait, we already have that [thehummerexperience.com].
  • But I doubt this will ever happen. Not because of technology. But because people are greedy.

    crmartin (98227) [slashdot.org], above, points out [slashdot.org] that the cost of energy would decrease about 50%. Why? If you're currently paying that rate for the electricity, there's no reason to decrease the price. Same with gas and oil prices. They raised the prices, MAYBE out of necessity, but when they have the opportunity to bring the price down significantly, maybe they will a few cents, to keep people buying, but why take a huge chu
    • crmartin 98227 points out [slashdot.org] below that if you can't be bothered to learn something about economics, you could at least develop a bit of historical perspective. Given that we have seen multiple order of magnitude price drops in other similar commodities in the past, your notion that prices for energy wouldn't drop seems empirically unsound.

  • Check your assumptions (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2003 @01:04AM (#6398179) Journal
    Sci-Fi and sci-fi games often incorporate...ships with ports of call on a myriad planets...I was toying with the physics of propelling such ships and their cargos out of a gravity well and realized the astronomical amounts of power it would take to do it (not to mention interstellar travel).

    Not so fast. You don't need that much energy to get from the bottom of one gravity well to the bottom of another, provided you can swap momentum around. There are a number of schemes along the lines of the cable cars that harvest energy from cars going down (and momentum from stopping cars) and feed it to cars going up / accellerating.

    There is no such thing as a free lunch, but often the problem isn't the cost of the lunch but of all the stuff you wastefully throw away while eating it.

    -- MarkusQ

  • The sun puts out more energy in roughly a month than all of the energy man has ever consumed in all of his existance on this planet. Harnesing that power doesn't mean lining the roof tops of the world with silly solar panels that wear out in the rain and sun and only work for a faction of the day, and that's in perfect weather conditions.. Instead an array of millions of power generating satelites orbiting near Mercury and beaming power continouously to a base on, say, the Moon would provide nearly unlimi
    • Economics strikes again: if it really would cost trillions and trillions, you've got the real problem that we don't have trillions and trillions to spend. The whole GDP of the US is in the neighborhood of $6 trillion, and the world overall certainly doesn't exceed $20 trillion. So what you're proposing is tantamount to suggesting we put everyone on Earth into working on power sats, dropping everything else from food production to programming video games.

      I doan' theeeeenk so, Cisco.

      Solar power is certain
  • Most recycling is either simply not done or not sensible simply because of the energy cost. Would we have inexpensive energy, we could afford to turn coal into oil, or recycle aluminium (today the cost/energy ratio - as shown by a Danish gov't report - actually would imply that burning aluminium would be cheaper than recycling it). Most recycling is simply not put into production because of the enormous energy cost involved in breaking down the molecules involved in building plastics and other stuff.

    Low c

  • Zero Point Energy anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jgoemat ( 565882 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2003 @03:08AM (#6398566)
    What if we could tap into Zero Point Energy [zpower.net]? The idea of zero point energy is controversial, but it's interesting to think about. What if we could tap into this nearly limitless source of power in a small and economical way? Imagine batteries with ten times the power output per volume of today's batteries, but they would never run out. Laptops and palm-sized computers would be used everywhere. You could even replace that noisy hot power supply in your tower computer with a ZPE battery. People could begin living off the power grid. Everything could have a ZPE battery to power itself. I imagine this would lead to a sharp reduction in cost and widespread adoptation of wireless sensor networks [berkeley.edu]. Hate sticking to your leather seats in the summer? Leave your electronic car's air conditioner on while you're at work. Maybe we could find a way to absorb heat and convert it into ZPE instead of merely transferring it to the outside.

    One of the biggest uses would have to be travel. Buy an electric car and never pay for fuel again. Start using propeller based planes or switch to super-fast electric trains. Maybe we could even have jets with ION propulsion [nasa.gov]. Ten times the propulsion for the same amount of fuel. Now we're talking about economical space travel. The cost of a trip to orbit could become affordable to about everyone. We could take the time to get to mars down from nine months to under 1.

  • With free enegery, the big change is that diamonds would be cheap to make in arbitrary sizes and quantities. Diamond fibre reinforced alloys have strength to weight ratios that make Formula 1 car designers long for the day they can afford to throw away all their flimsy heavy carbon fibre and magnesium alloys. Imagine what it would do to the construction and transportation industries if they were cost-effective?

    Diamond itself also has amazingly good heat conductivity that will allow revolutions, since you c

  • Destruction of Humanity (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tigersha ( 151319 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2003 @06:23AM (#6399001) Homepage
    The problem with the whole Scifi spaceship dreamy thingie is that the amount of energy required to power a ship, say of Millenium Falcon size, out of the Terran gravity well and then onwards into interstellar space is probably going to be enough to destroy a small city, if not a large one. And if you have that sort of things concentrated in a small ship some nutcase is going to buy one and perform an uncontrolled release.

    A jet airliner loaded with fuel has a similar explosive potential as a small tactical nuclear weapon, as New Yorkers found out the hard way, and a spaceship will probably have the potential energy of a very, very large thermonuclear weapon. And if the nice ship is designed to blast off in one shot and zoom into the sunset the powerplant is going to have to be designed to release a large amount of that energy in a short time (unlike nuclear batteries in contemporaty spacecraft which do have a lot of potential but only need to release a small amount of it over a long time).

    The long term place for serious energy production lies in antimatter in any case. One gram of antimatter annihilating with matter is enough to completely blow a city-sized hole into the ground, easy. One day the question of whether you want to put that sort of generating capacity into a small, handy penlight sized batter will be a technological problem. Perhaps we should think of the sociological problems before we do that.

    But that all lies in the future. A more relevant question is about the here and now. Even today you get quite high energy densities in small devices. Modern Lithium Ion Cellphone batteries made cellphones possible. Your average innocent looking blocky thing inside you cellphone has a thermal and electical fuse inside it to completely shut down the battery if it should ever run out of specs because Lihium Ion batteries can explode. The cellphone makers put this safety mechanism into the batteries because early models blew up next to users heads. The marketing droid referred to this as "discharge with flame". Indeed. What sort of flame would you get from a penlight-sized antimatter batter that some teen geek opened up?

    One argument against this is that it depends on how the free energy is delivered. For instance if it is by means of a fusion powerplant driving the electrical grid, you are still limited by the carrying capacity of the network.

    Hoever, if you get a situation where someone could get a cute little mini fusion plant in his house which will deliver Gigawatts of energy some other possibilities becomes possible. Read the heat waste argument in the discussion.

    Another favourite liberal argument is that there is always the argument that as technology puts more destructive potential into people's hand it also puts more potential to counteract that destruction. Even current technology is quite powerful, one guy in New Zealand (I think) is currently building a demonstration model of a cruise missle. For $5000. There was an article in K5 about this a short while ago. Visionary people like James Gosling are already getting scared by the potantial.

    The question is if one guy's experiment will destroy most of humanity before humanity develops a counterattack. Its like a food cycle. If there are too many sharks they eat the fish and then there is not enough fish, the sharks die, and then fish multiply again and then there is more food for the rest of the sharks and cycle continues. Problem is, if that cycle gets off the chart and both species dies off.

    And last, "free" is a relative term. "Free" for me means *I* don't have to pay the energy costs of my system. One way of harnessing pretty much free energy is to use a self replicating system where each generation harvests its own energy from the environment, so you, the creator does not have to supply all the energy for the system as a whole to run its course. A Computer virus uses energy paid for by someone else to run on his computer, so for you the virus writer its pretty free. Biological agents are the same thing. The guy who gets infected eats carbohydrates to keep your bioweapon alive.

    Until he dies.

    The whole "free cheap portable source of energy" problem will create a bad

  • How do you envision the world changing if energy costs became a trivial part of economic equations?"

    Very, very, hot! Seriously, a fair bit of that 'free' energy is going to end up as heat - it's a matter of efficiency. Energy that doesn't go toward doing the intended work ends up as heat. If energy is used within the troposphere, the resultatnt heat must either be dissipated to space radiatively, or it'll just heat the earth or atmosphere. Not good.

  • Any source of cheap, unlimited and free energy would be the end of man. Any source of unlimited energy can likely be scaled to the point where it becomes a tremendously devasating weapon, or is used to produce WMD inexpensively. Anyone naieve enough to think that this wouldn't happen in kidding themselves.

    I read an essay or interview with Tesla (who was interested in the possibilities of "free" energy) that expressed similar views; his approach was to look at ways to develop defensive shields that made wea

  • Surely... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Von75 ( 688017 )
    Lots of people keep bringing up Global warming as a problem but if you have all this power (cheap) couldn't you just build a reeeally big air conditioning unit?
  • realized the astronomical amounts of power it would take to [propel such ships and their cargos out of a gravity well] (not to mention interstellar travel)

    Out of curiousity, what numbers did you come up with?

    I ask because we're already sending craft into interstellar space (well, they're on their way [nasa.gov]), and presumably it didn't take an astronimcal amount of power. Of course, there's a big difference between a space probe and a tanker full of dark matter [geocities.com].
  • A lot of folks are assuming that waste heat would be a huge problem with free energy. I see it as a non-issue for two reasons.

    1. It would be pretty simple to legislate low heat emissions on-planet... and dead simple to monitor via satellite.

    2. High-energy manufacturing would all move off-planet to get away from heat pollution laws.

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